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What proof is there that God exists?

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Thank you for your important question. In a world where more and more people are deciding to follow a worldview that has no room for God, this question is clearly a key one for us to be asking. I hope that this answer will help you on your way towards a sure faith that God is really there, and more than that, He is a God who loves His world, and wants to bless those who have faith in Him.

Let me start by saying, the honest answer to your question is that when we deal with the existence of God, we don’t deal in proof, but with evidence. I cannot in this answer give you concrete proof that God is there - it just isn’t possible - but what I can give you is evidence.

I believe that the evidence we will talk about is compelling, but that can still only lead you to a place where you must have what the Bible calls faith. To have faith in something is to be convinced that something is real despite the fact that you cannot see it in front of your eyes. The Bible tells us that faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 1:8), and this shows us that whether we like it or not, there is a supernatural element to what it means to be a Christian. The subject of the existence of God is not just like a science experiment where we come up with a positive or a negative result by examining everything - God is a person to be known rather than an object to discover, and I pray that this answer would cause you to take a step of faith towards Him, allowing Him to prove Himself to you - He is more than able to do just that.

The first piece of evidence we should look at is the main source of information we have about God, and that is the Bible. The Bible itself never deals with proving the existence of God, it basically just assumes that He does from the very beginning, but the Bible is still a great source of evidence for the existence of the God it describes. You see, the Bible isn’t just one single book - a book that could be easily created by anyone with an over-active imagination and plenty of time on their hands. The Bible is a collection of 66 different books that span a time period of over 1500 years, and are written by over 40 different writers from all walks of life, many of whom never met each other. What is remarkable about this is how consistent the message of the Bible is, and not only that, but due to the way in which the Bible was so widely copied and distributed when it was first written, we can be incredibly sure that what we read in the Bible today is exactly what these writers were originally inspired by God to write.

The number one evidence that God is real is that there is a miraculous book written all about Him - it is hard to see how the Bible could possibly exist as it does without God at work behind the scenes, ‘inspiring’ His people to write exactly what He wanted to be written.

It is just incredibly unlikely that the Bible could have been created by human beings in such an amazing way, and this fact has just been further backed up by the Bible’s impact on millions of people over the last 2000 years - and that impact is still going on today.

Let us look at a few more evidences that God is real:

1. Creation - When you look around at the world we live in there are basically two options you have for where it all came from. Firstly, you could believe that it all came about by accident - whether it was a big bang, a process over billions of years, or whatever else, the crux of this belief would be that there is no driving force behind the world - no designer, no design, and no purpose. What other area of life would we ever think like this in though? Would we look at a beautiful painting and conclude that it came about as a result of a few tins of paint falling off the top shelf and splashing onto the canvas? Would we walk through a big city and marvel at how all the buildings were formed by an explosion in a junkyard? Of course we do not. Why then, do we look at a human being and say we’re just a random accident? It just doesn’t make sense, and what’s more, deep down we all know that our lives are worth far more than that - we live as though we have meaning, purpose and value, even if our worldview tells us otherwise.

I think it should be pretty plain for us to see that the most logical understanding of the origin of the universe must include a designer, a design, and a purpose that we were created for - only then will we begin to understand life as we ought to.

2. Conscience - Everyone in the world possesses a conscience - that little voice in the back of your mind that whispers to you whether what you are about to do is right or wrong. It is a universal part of being a human being, and though morality may vary slightly across cultures, there are many things that are exactly the same, wherever you go in the world.

The question we must ask is this - where does this voice come from? You could argue that these morals have just developed over many years, and passed down through generations, but that just doesn’t fit with an atheistic ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology. The truth is, if there is nothing outside of the material world we live in, then any kind of morality has no foundation whatsoever - there is no right and wrong, and no basis for anyone to judge someone else for anything they do. As an extreme example of where this leads, if I decided that it was fine for me to go around killing people at random because it makes me happy, no-one has any basis to tell me what I’m doing is wrong - society may try and stop me, but it has no right to morally judge me. Now, I’m fairly certain that when you hear that, just like me, there’s something inside you that reacts against what I just said. We know deep down that there is a standard of right and wrong, and that inbuilt knowledge can only logically have come from someone or something outside of us, and that someone is God.

3. Changed lives - I don’t know what your opinion of the church, or Christians in general, but they themselves are our next source of evidence. Sadly there is a very great variety of people who call themselves Christian, and some of it is far from good. This can bring great confusion to people when they think about the Christian faith, and I don’t doubt puts some of them off, but I don’t want to talk about this kind of ‘Christian’ but rather about the genuine article.

Even when you take away the fake kind of Christianity, there are still millions of people all across the world who are claiming the same very real experience - they are claiming that God has met with them and changed their lives for the better. Many people think that to be a Christian just means to follow a set of rituals for worship and commandments for living, but in reality it is so much more than that. To be a Christian is to have had a revelation of who God is, and to have trusted in Him as the only means of salvation and eternal life. Then the Bible declares that God comes to live within the person who does this by the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9-11). How can a person possibly be the same when God comes to live inside of them? They can’t, and so true Christianity is all about a transformation of a person from the inside out - we’re not talking about perfection here, and the change can take time, but we are talking about a genuine difference.

What this means is that every person in the world who has this kind of experience is evidence that God is real - you can write off that evidence by saying that they’re crazy, or liars, but you cannot deny the fact that these people are living evidence of a living God.

4. Christ - Lastly, we look at the most important of all the evidences that God exists. I’ve heard so many people say something like this to me: ‘You know, I’ll believe in God once He comes down out of heaven, and stands in front of me - why would I believe in someone I can’t even see?’ I totally understand what people mean when they say this - of course it’s easier to believe something when you’ve actually seen it, but here’s the thing - God has come down to this earth, and He did stand right in front of men and women just like you and me.

The eye-witnesses of the Bible, along with secular historians, tell us the story of the God-man - Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God who lived in this world for about 33 years, and demonstrated through all that He said and did that God is real. The miracles He performed, the profound truth He proclaimed, and the perfection of life that He achieved all point us toward the fact that Jesus was no ordinary man, but was the Son of God just as He claimed, equal in every respect to God Himself.

As if that wasn’t enough, it doesn’t even end there, but after His wrongful death on a Roman cross, the ultimate declaration of God’s existence took place - Jesus rose from the grave, triumphant over death itself, and it’s this declaration that gives us real hope of a life beyond this one - a life in heaven itself.

So, all that remains for me to do is to ask whether you will receive the evidence that I have put before you today, and take that step of faith towards the God who loves you, and through His death and resurrection is willing to give you a new life - an eternal life, beginning here in this world, but stretching endlessly into the world to come, a world of perfection in the presence of God. You see, as Jesus died on that cross 2000 years ago, He was making a way that you could come to God through Him - the Bible puts it like this:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18)

Though Jesus was perfect He died the death of a sinner - a title that all of us can claim for ourselves - and He did so in order that He could grant forgiveness to anyone who comes to Him.

Jesus died the death that we deserve so that we can go free, and He was separated from His Father so that we could be brought into fellowship with God. As we’ve already said, Jesus was then raised to life, showing without a doubt that though physical death will still come to all of us, we can have hope of a life beyond death, a life that will last forever.

As I said at the beginning - I’ve given you no absolute proof of God’s existence, but I believe that the evidence we’ve looked at is compelling, and so I urge you to take that step of faith towards God - He is more than able to meet you in that place, convince you of His existence once and for all, and welcome you into that relationship with Himself. Cry out to Him to save you, and I can guarantee that, if you come humbly, He will not let you down.

Here are some more Bible Verses for your further consideration:

John 3:1-21

1 Corinthians 15

Romans 3:19-26

I hope this answer helps you to find peace with God through Jesus Christ. If you want to know more about what Jesus has done for you please watch the video on the main part of our site: Watch the video

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*All Scripture references are taken From The English Standard Version of the Holy Bible unless stated otherwise

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